Sources and updates
Sources and update log
Every external institution this site cites, in one place, with the page linked and the date it was checked — and a dated log of what changed on this site and when, so a returning reader can see what is new without re-reading every page.
Every institution this site cites
| Institution | What this site uses from it | Retrieved |
|---|---|---|
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics | National hourly wage percentiles for the six trades a kitchen job employs | 2026-08-06 |
| U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics — Producer Price Index | Commodity-level price indexes for cabinetry, appliances, plumbing fittings and lumber | 2026-08-06 |
| U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis | State-level Regional Price Parities, the one sourced regional cost signal on this site | 2026-09-24 |
| U.S. Environmental Protection Agency | The lead-safe work-practice requirement for homes built before 1978 | 2026-09-24 |
| U.S. Access Board | Kitchen work-surface clear-floor-space guidance and its actual legal scope | 2026-09-24 |
| Federal Trade Commission, Consumer Advice | Written-contract, payment-schedule and contractor red-flag guidance | 2026-09-24 |
| Consumer Financial Protection Bureau | Home equity line of credit terms and risk guidance | 2026-09-24 |
The per-constant version of the first two rows — every wage and index this site actually calculates with, each with its own request address, retrieval date and verbatim series readout — lives on the methodology page. This page is the institution-level index; that one is the audit trail.
Why these institutions, and not the ones most cost calculators cite
Every row in the table above is a primary source: the agency that collected the data, wrote the rule, or published the guidance, not a secondary site summarising it. That rule cuts out a lot of the material an ordinary kitchen-cost search turns up — consumer cost guides, contractor-marketing blogs, and the aggregator sites that mostly republish one another’s numbers with a new headline. Those secondary sources are not banned from this site’s reasoning, but nothing on this site presents one of them as the primary basis for a figure when a primary source exists to check it against instead.
Two federal statistical agencies (BLS, BEA) supply every number this site calculates with. Two federal agencies with a direct regulatory or consumer-protection mandate (EPA, the Access Board) supply the rule-based claims about what a remodel legally has to account for. Two consumer-finance and consumer-protection bodies (the FTC, the CFPB) supply the guidance about the transaction itself — the contract, the payment, the financing — because a kitchen remodel is a construction project and a large consumer purchase at the same time, and this site treats both halves as worth sourcing properly.
What this page deliberately does not do
It does not print a single blended "average cost" figure pulled from a secondary aggregator, for the same reason the rest of this site does not: no primary source publishes one that means anything across every kitchen. It does not cite a state or local permit fee schedule, because there is no single one — your own jurisdiction’s office is the only correct source for that figure, and this site says so on the permits page rather than guessing. And it does not treat a consumer-protection agency’s guidance as though it were a construction cost figure; the FTC and CFPB rows above inform judgment, not arithmetic, and neither one feeds a number into any calculator on this site.
Update log
| Date | What changed |
|---|---|
| 2026-09-24 | Added six pages of planning content — price drivers, reading a contractor quote, regional cost factors, permits and code triggers, when not to remodel, and two worked examples run through the live calculator — plus this sources-and-update-log page. Added ten new sourced figures: eight state Regional Price Parities from the Bureau of Economic Analysis and two derived regional wage illustrations built from them. |
| 2026-08-06 | Every wage, index, derived escalation and labelled assumption behind the twelve original calculators was retrieved and re-verified on this date. Full detail on the methodology page. |
How often this gets checked again
Every sourced or derived figure on this site carries a six-month freshness horizon from its own retrieval date. A figure past that horizon is either re-verified against the live source or removed, never left standing on a stale date. The regional price parities and the four qualitative sources on this page follow the same six-month policy, even though they are cited directly rather than through a numeric figure.
This is a mechanical check, not an editorial promise: a new change to this site cannot ship a figure whose retrieval date has already aged past that horizon, so a stale row cannot silently ride in inside a change that was really about something else. An already-live page does not go dark the day a figure crosses that line — the page keeps serving, its "last reviewed" date stays honest about how old the figure actually is, and the figure is queued for the next data refresh instead of blocking an unrelated fix.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics wage and index rows on this site were retrieved 2026-08-06 and age fastest in practice, because producer price indexes publish monthly. The regional price parities and the four qualitative sources added on 2026-09-24 are annual releases and rule text that changes far less often, but they carry the identical six-month horizon rather than a looser one, because a freshness policy that varies by how convenient it is defeats the purpose of having one.
A wrong or outdated figure is the most useful thing you can tell us — see the contact page for how to send it, and the editorial policy for exactly what happens to a report once it arrives.